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Ratings reboot: How Twitter and YouTube are changing TV and music

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Recognizing that media is being consumed on multiple screens at a time, Nielsen is creating a Twitter TV rating. A recent study showed that an increase in Twitter activity for a TV show can correlate to ratings growth. The papal conclave was one event that had TV viewers simultaneously flocking to Twitter.
(Photo by AFP/Lionel Bonaventure/Getty Images)

Rather than dash out the door so she can raise a glass to 48 hours of free time, Bohan stays inside. Hers is a homebound ritual, one of two screens.

"It's 9 p.m. ... iPad's out!"

Every Friday night, after a takeout dinner, Bohan, 26, who works by day marketing arts groups through social media, sits with her boyfriend and a tablet computer in their Hoboken apartment. The first screen — the TV — is tuned to "Shark Tank," ABC's entrepreneurial competition series. The second screen — the iPad — is for Twitter.

Once on the social network, Bohan makes a beeline for #sharktank. A hashtag, it's a connector for living rooms across the country, from Hoboken to Kentucky, the outer bounds of the Eastern time zone.

When Amanda Bohan tweeted Lori Greiner, one of the stars of 'Shark Tank,' she got a direct reply. Bohan says partaking in the show's Twitter audience adds significantly to her viewing experience.Courtesy Amanda Bohan

Collectively, Bohan and other social TV watchers can propel a show into the "trends," or most tweeted-about topics — a constantly updated measure of popularity. Mirroring this Twitter audience are YouTube viewers, the human engine behind viral videos that can take music from near-obscurity to the top of the charts.

Nielsen, the entity responsible for TV ratings, is sitting up and taking notice. Coming this fall: the Nielsen Twitter TV rating, measuring the reach of tweets about TV.

Such acknowledgment of a digital network's importance to audiences isn't confined to television. Last month, Billboard, a magazine that long has published music industry ratings, made a similar play in announcing its U.S. charts would immediately begin using YouTube data to determine a song's rank.

Social media, it seems, are just too influential to ignore.

"Any credible measurement, whether it's ratings or music charts, needs to adapt to where the audience is going," said Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard's director of charts.

On Feb. 21, Billboard and Nielsen — which measures music sales with Nielsen SoundScan and both radio play and online streaming through Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems — jointly reported YouTube views would be added to the formula that decides chart rankings for U.S. singles, individual music genres and a new streaming songs chart.

'Harlem Shake' has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks running. The song first claimed No. 1 the same week Billboard began using YouTube data as a ratings metric.Billboard

The same day, "Harlem Shake," a track from the Brooklyn producer Baauer, topped the Billboard Hot 100. YouTube reported 103 million U.S. views of the song in that first week of the new ratings formula, powered by an intensely viral video meme involving group dance.

Vivien Lewit, content partnerships director at YouTube, calls "Harlem Shake" — which has remained at No. 1 five weeks in a row — an infamous example of the new Billboard metric. Users were moved to participate in the trend with their own videos, adding significantly to the final count. Baauer, she said, "went from not being in the Hot 100 at all to being No. 1 in a single week."

Though that's a big jump, Pietroluongo said, YouTube views do not count more than traditional variables, meaning record sales and radio play. Though it was popular on YouTube, he said "Friday," the 2011 single from California teen Rebecca Black, would not have claimed No. 1 in the Hot 100. (In the old chart, it peaked at 58.) Listeners either found Black's song incredibly catchy or inescapably annoying.

Tynicka Battle sides with the latter opinion.

"That would be a shame if that made the top five over other talent out there," said Battle, 38, of Belle Mead. A digital marketer, she considers YouTube the primary route to new songs, supplanting an artist's official website and MySpace page. "From a consumer perspective, it's really important," she said.

Paying attention to digital, socially connected audiences can prove meaningful to viewers, networks and advertisers. Some live TV shows stream tweets in real time, moving the social web into the broadcast. Still, many Twitter TV trends are organic.

Regardless of being an old movie, Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America" is a case study of programming that repeatedly soars to the worldwide trends.

Viewers also use the hashtag #nw, "now watching," to communicate what's on their "first screen" — it could be the 2001 comedy "Pootie Tang," a presidential debate or the antics of reality denizens from "Bad Girls Club." (All have trended on Twitter.)

Steve Hasker anticipates the Twitter rating will be "the first syndicated daily metric of daily engagement." Hasker, Nielsen's president of global product leadership, said the analysis will incorporate the reach and character of TV-related tweets, including who is sending them.

"What we're trying to do is create something of a standard around which the ecosystem can develop," he said.

Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in a scene from the 1988 movie 'Coming to America.' Known to become a Twitter trend when it's on TV, the film comedy is an exercise in 'social TV,' with fans tweeting their favorite lines, or simply announcing to others that they're watching. Paramount Pictures

If two shows have the same standard Nielsen rating for males ages 18-36, Hasker said, the Twitter rating could act as a tiebreaker.

Existing services such as Nielsen's SocialGuide, Twitter's Bluefin Labs and Trendrr track mentions of TV across social media platforms. Once a buzzword, the very term "second screen" is fast becoming history, said Mark Ghuneim, Trendrr's CEO.

Mo Krochmal, executive editor of the website Social TV Daily, "watched" the Oscars on four screens — his TV, tablet and two cell phones. Krochmal sees social media as the ultimate water cooler, making traditional ratings incomplete.

"The feeling in the industry is that they're broken," he said. "Twitter may or may not be the most important, simply because it's an open system.

On Wednesday, Nielsen's SocialGuide reported the results of a study of live tweets about TV, confirming that an increase in Twitter activity about a TV show is associated with higher ratings for premieres and midseason episodes. The link is strongest in the key 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

Yet advertisers are not always convinced about the pull of social media, said Natan Edelsburg, writer for the social TV website Lost Remote. "It's really tough to sell anything that's not a traditional TV spot," he said.

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Edelsburg is supervising producer of the Shorty Awards, now in their fifth year recognizing excellence in social media. This year, A&E is sponsoring a Shorties category for best animated graphics interchange format because fans of the network's reality series "Duck Dynasty" produce so many.

Despite such cross-promotion, some industry trackers remain skeptical. "Don't mistake a few million tweets for huge numbers of people," said Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group in New Brunswick. In October, Nielsen partnered with the market research firm to survey word-of-mouth mentions of TV and brands. Their data show around 90 percent of such conversations are delivered in person, said Keller, not by Facebook, text, phone or e-mail.

But for Montclair's Anthony Frasier, TV is a Twitter experience. Frasier, 27, runs a Newark-based startup and became a social TV convert monitoring hashtags for high-wattage series such as "Breaking Bad" and basketball games.

"I feel bad for the people on the West Coast," he said. "They have to ignore Twitter for at least three hours."